Saturday, May 02, 2009

Phew. As Blogging Against Disablism Day gets bigger, it gets harder to keep on top of it. There have been some 200 entries this year, all of which can be found here. I've read about 120 of them since yesterday morning and now I can take no more. I will make the effort to read the others over the next week or so, but the intensive effort has to stop now.

For those of you who, for some strange reason, don't want to turn your eyeballs inside out and spend your entire Bank Holiday Weekend reading 200 posts about disablism, I decided to do like I did last year and post a rather more easily-digestible handful of my favourite BADD posts.

Remember, I haven't read all the posts yet and this is my top five percent of the posts that I have read, so if yours isn't in there, please don't take it as any kind of slight... oh, and it doesn't include posts from the half-dozen or so BADD bloggers who I consider "friends" because I felt that might be somewhat biased.

Laura at Gin & Comment: "Mainstream" schooling and disablism. A peripatetic English teacher in Japan writes about the different ways schoolchildren respond to disability when different approaches to integrated schooling are applied.

Lauredhel at Hoyden About Town: Can I have a seat? Discusses practical access issues in and around shops and services, and the issues involved in trying to explain access needs that go beyond having a ramp somewhere.

Dora Raymaker at Autism - Change.org: Just Because I'm Quiet Doesn't Mean I Don't Understand. Required reading for those who assume that just because a person can't communicate verbally (or at all) and/or "looks disabled", it therefore means they can't understand what you are saying about them.

RachelCreative: When My Disability Is Invisible raises the problem of assumptions in the other direction - people assuming that you can do what they are demanding of you and that your requests for help or adjustments are merely contrariness that can be safely ignored. This post is accompanied by some of Rachel's own wonderful disability artwork.

Sanabitur Anima Mea: Mild and Severe disability. About dependence, interdependence, and 'degrees' of disability. As the writer says: "I don’t believe there’s anyone out there who has the special magical amount of severity which is enough to get your needs taken seriously but not so much you get considered worthless."

Astrid at Astrid's Journal: BADD Behavior: Disablism in Psychiatry. Raising the point that some behaviours considered undesirable by mental health professionals may not be a symptom of the patient's condition, but might be a sane and understandable response to the (wilful or incidental) dehumanising treatment imposed on patients by those professionals for their own convenience.

Tony at Cynical Chatter From The Underworld: Fear and Loathing in the UK. Cynical indeed, a dark post about the negative portrayal and poor treatment of disabled people in our society, and the lack of meaningful protections against the consequences of this.